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- TTP Liquidity Brief | Issue 72 - Offshore dollars, onshore ambitions
TTP Liquidity Brief | Issue 72 - Offshore dollars, onshore ambitions
From Africa’s first electronic bill of exchange to stablecoins, AI and secondary market trade finance, this week’s TTP newsletter explores how financial infrastructure is evolving across new rails and markets.
Deepesh Patel
September 21, 2026
🌟 A note from the Deputy Editor
The Adriatic did wonders for my well-being last week. I extended my trip to ITFA's 52nd Annual Trade & Forfaiting Conference, heading onward to the beautiful island of Hvar after Split, and I can report that a few days on the water is a very effective reset.
On the boat back to Split, and not a fancy schmancy one, the story of Africa's first five electronic bills of exchange, under newly enacted Mauritian law, dropped into my inbox. It is a genuinely great result which TTP exclusively reported (making me quite seasick), and I want to see far more like it. But a first is only a first. The real prize is now getting transactional scale, with or without platforms, and getting corporates to actually use digital documents in the wild, rather than reaching for another assisted proof of concept.
On my last afternoon in Hvar, my pal Matthew and I climbed up to the Fortica, the fortress that crowns Hvar town. The island grew wealthy because it sat on the Adriatic sea lanes, an important trade route connecting Italy and the wider Mediterranean, and the townspeople paid for that fort out of the proceeds of their salt trade.
Now, trade routes do change, and so do the people with the nerve to build and hold them.
This is the perfect note on which to launch ‘Frontier Founders’, our brave new spotlight series about those building ‘new’ across liquidity and risk management. (DM me if you think we should feature someone.)
Our first guest is Olugbenga Agboola, chief executive of Flutterwave, on the long work of rebuilding Africa's financial infrastructure.
We also have a double bill on AI that is well worth your time versus doomscrolling on how humanity could be wiped in the next decade. We’ve had our Global Advisory Panel and Editorial Board hard at work. David Meynell discusses why AI may be having a difficult moment yet still offers practical solutions for trade finance, paired with Richard Wulff of ICISA on how the regulator views AI creeping into trade credit insurance.
Our slow read takes its time with Societe Generale, and TTP’s Tim Staheli quietly explores the radical idea of the French bank exporting dollars again. If the phrase "offshore dollars" makes you think of the 1950s, you are reading this right.
And finally, this week our magazine lands (we’ve now sent it to press), timed so that you can read it on your journey to Sibos in Miami, and know how to drop buzzwords into your meetings without sounding like a plonker. I’ll have some spares in my backpack on BA207, so feel free to bug me for a copy (but please don’t wake me up if I’m asleep). I will not give too much away, but we’re exposing who and what is rewiring financial infrastructure, rails and routes.
Until next time, see some of you in Miami, beach. (And I’ve promised to give a fire performance here.)
— Deepesh Patel, Editor in Chief
Country of the Week: Ghana
Ghana moved around $20 billion of goods last year, led by gold, crude oil and cocoa, against roughly $15 billion of imports. It was featured last week in the WTO's World Trade Report 2026, which spotlights Ghanaian entrepreneur, Anne Sarfo, founder of the Accra food company Annes Perfections. Sarfo’s business was positively transformed by the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement and the International Trade Centre platform, helping her goods flow through customs on trips from Abidjan to Toronto. However, Africa still accounts for under 3% of world trade. This year's edition was edited by TTP's own Carter Hoffman, our Deputy Editor, who worked with the WTO Secretariat to present these findings at the Public Forum in Geneva last week.
Croatia trade stats (2024):
Total exports: $20.4bn | Total Imports: $15.4bn |
Largest export destination: Switzerland ($4.28B) | Largest import partner: China ($9.84B) |
Largest Export: Gold ($5.9B) | Largest Import: Refined Petroleum ($1.52B) |
Source: OEC
Slow Read
Stablecoins and cross-border payments: dollars that never went home
By: Tim Staheli
Sponsored by Societe Generale
In the late 1950s, banks in Paris began lending out dollar deposits held outside the United States. Nobody realised they were founding anything. But what they’d created was the eurodollar market: dollars beyond the reach of American regulators and American banking hours, which grew from an accounting curiosity into the funding market of global finance.
Seventy years on, a French bank is exporting dollars again. Societe Generale’s digital assets subsidiary, SG-FORGE, launched its dollar stablecoin in 2025, two years after its euro one. It’s spent the year since building the token a home: a wallet integration here, an exchange listing there, a place in Europe’s settlement plans.
The precedent cuts both ways. It says the sceptics will lose, because once money escapes its home infrastructure, it doesn’t go back. It says the maximalists will lose too, because the eurodollar never replaced the domestic dollar system. It plugged into it, settled through it, and the banks that sat at the join became the ones clients couldn’t do without.
Michel Colbert, Head of Cash Clearing and Correspondent Banking at Societe Generale, and Gildas Le Treut, Societe Generale-FORGE’s Chief Business Officer, believe their group is built to sit at that join again, this time for stablecoins: one of the few banks anywhere with a major correspondent network on one side and a regulated stablecoin issuer on the other, under the same roof.
A market that talks in dollars
SG-FORGE was set up in 2020. It issued its euro stablecoin in 2023, the first stablecoin issued by a G-SIB group. The dollar followed two years later, complementing the euro strategy rather than replacing it: the two tokens serve different jobs and different clients, and the European vision stands. The commercial reason for the dollar is simple. “The stablecoin market is roughly $300 billion, and more than 99 per cent of it is pegged to the dollar,” said Le Treut. He’s right: market trackers put the total at close to $300 billion as of mid-August 2026, almost all of it in dollars.
A European bank is issuing offshore dollars because that’s where the liquidity is. That’s the eurodollar logic again, on new rails. With one difference, and it’s one the first eurodollar bankers would have envied: this money is regulated from birth. Le Treut points to America’s GENIUS Act as a reason to be in dollars now. Colbert pairs it with Europe’s MiCA. “It cannot work if there is no trust,” he said. “And one key element of trust is regulation: MiCA, and GENIUS on the US side.”
Colbert has watched the conversation change from close range. “Two years ago we were speaking about crypto-assets. Now we speak about payment infrastructure, and settlement through stablecoins,” he said. At a BAFT forum of US clearing banks earlier this year, it was among the main topics on the table.
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